Claude Brixhe


Claude Brixhe is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Nancy in France. His research interests include ancient and modern Greek dialects, Koine Greek, the history of the Greek alphabet, and non-Greek Anatolian languages.

Koine Greek

In a 1993 article, Brixhe wrote about the influence of koine on the Doric dialect Cretan. He studied Cretan inscriptions from the Hellenistic period and substantiated the presence of forms that were a product of linguistic admixture, as well as those that could be attributed to koine. Araceli Striano writes: "This fact highlighted something which scholars had already suspected: koine did not suddenly replace the local dialects nor did those dialects disappear abruptly. On the contrary, the process of linguistic leveling in the Greek-speaking world was rather gradual, fostering the emergence of standard local varieties with their own distinctive particularities due to the coexistence of koine and different variants of ancient Greek."